Black Book Interactive Project

FAIN: HD-248607-16

University of Kansas Center for Research, Inc. (Lawrence, KS 66045-3101)
Maryemma Graham (Project Director: September 2015 to June 2019)

Preliminary steps toward developing a metadata schema that accounts for race in order to increase scholarly access to archival materials.

The negligible number of African American (AA) literary texts digitally available for scholars working in the field of digital humanities remains a persistent problem. The Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) responds to this critical digital invisibility by proposing to create a metadata schema that accounts for race, to make these archives more discoverable for scholarship. Using 75 novels from the Project on the History of Black Writing digital archive, we will produce a demonstration project that increases access to little known AA texts, encourages and enables text mining as a digital practice, and bridges the current gaps in computational research in literary studies. Our goal is to expand the community of users and practitioners and to make this schema a standard for the interactive exploration of similar digitized collections.

Media Coverage

Metadata Project to Seek Trends, Themes in African American Literature (Media Coverage)
Author(s): George Diepenbrock
Publication: University of Kansas
Date: 9/30/2016
Abstract: A KU Press Release explaining the Black Book Interactive Project
URL: https://news.ku.edu/2016/09/08/metadata-project-seek-trends-themes-african-american-literature

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